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If you get the PageRank plugin for Firefox, you can check out the ranking of a lot of sites out there on the web. I try to glean insights from cnn.com; they seem to rank really well and craft stories and pages in a way that gets pinged frequently from SEs.

Remember, SEO isn't everything. You can send all the right signals to the search engines to get people there, but you need to have the page optimized for converting the user to do your desired action. So a site may be well optimized for search engines, but it might not necessarily do your business any good.

I am guessing you are looking for sites to use as examples so you can emulate your site after them? Each site is unique for various reasons. In general I would recommend wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sudan Things to notice:

- the URL is not technology dependent (i.e. no .php or .html after the page name)

- the URL matches the page's title

- the URL is a flat structure

- the page's title is a H1 tag and is the first content you see on the page

- on most wiki pages, the very first words of the wiki article is the page's title. You will also see the page's title repeated several times throughout the article, and in various forms. In this example you see "South Sudan", "Southern Sudan", etc.

- the wiki content uses consistent anchor text to link to other pages within the site. For example, anytime you see "landlocked country" in this wiki article, or any other one, it is a hyperlink to wiki's "landlocked country" page.

There are no hidden secrets here. It is about taking all of the SEO basics found in the Beginner's Guide to SEO, then applying them consistently throughout your site, along with providing great content which is up-to-date. If you do that, you will find your website on page 1 of search results.

I could also suggest the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/, but you cannot copy them as their methods will probably not work for you. For example, they have over 400 links on their home page. They have a DA and PA of 100, which allows them to support that many links. If you were to copy them thinking "well NYT does it and they are successful" it would simply not work for you.

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